But, again, the hunting impulse here assumed to have possessed some anthropoid was not something entirely new; anthropoids and many other Primates are known to seize and devour birds, lizards and even small mammals when chance offers an easy opportunity. It is merely a greater persistence in this behaviour that turns it into hunting. How very improbable that such a change should _not_ sometimes occur! Is it not likely to have occurred often, and with many failures? Similarly, of the resulting changes: the differentiation of our hands and feet is only an advance upon what you see in the gorilla; as for our ground-life, can the adult male gorilla be fairly called arboreal? Several Primates use unwrought weapons; most of them lead a gregarious life, to which our own is a return; they are co-operative at least in defence; like many other animals, they communicate by gestures and inarticulate vocal cries. Co-operative hunting, indeed, seems to be new in our Order; but since wolves and dogs, or their ancestors, fell in with it some time or other, why should it be beyond the capacity of apes? On second thoughts, is the co-operative raiding of plantations by baboons something altogether different from hunting in pack? Thus at each occasion of change in structure or function, Lycopithecus merely carried some tendency of the other Primates a little further, and a little further; until, certainly, he went a long way. The whole movement can be distinctly pictured throughout, and it has an air of being natural or even inevitable. Few hypotheses ask us to grant less than this one. Moreover, if the story is not true, Man is an exception to the rule of animal life, that the structure of every organism is made up of apparatus subserving its peculiar conditions of nutrition and reproduction. Indeed, conditions of nutrition are the ground of the differentiation of animals and plants. Conditions of reproduction need not here be considered, as the apparatus is the same in the anthropoids and in ourselves. With many species to avoid being eaten and to mate are the reasons for some secondary characters, such as protective armour or coloration, fleetness with its correlative structures, nuptial plumage, and so forth. But to avoid being eaten and to mate, it is first of all necessary to eat and live; and accordingly, for each sort of animal, starting from the organisation of some earlier stock, its structure and activities are determined by the kind of food it gets, and the conditions of getting it: in our case, the hunting of game afoot. FOOTNOTES: [1] This was suggested to me by Mr. G. A. Garfitt. [2] [Illustration]